"Good help is hard to find," Jack sympathized.
"Cheap good help is hard to find," Billy countered. "If it weren't for me, they'd still be in the village, wearing them rubber sandals, gong hen, the shit still between their toes." He watched them unloading the trailer, said, "You're in America, I keep telling 'em. Be American."
"Yeah," Jack twisted, "Be like us. Misery loves company." They slapped palms and Jack added, "One last thing, I need to know about the Fuk Ching."
Just then it got busy in the shop, a sudden line of Midwestern tourists gawking at the Yellows, each buying souvenir packs of sweet tofu cake.
Jack wised to Billy's busy situation.
Billy patted him on the shoulder, tipped his chin at him and said, "Later, Grandpa's, around midnight." Then he moved off into the hubbub, toward the truck.
Jack finished the daojeungand went out the side door, past the helpers unloading the sacks of beans, past the deliverymen with their carts full of cheungfun, broad noodles. He took a last look at Billy, who was barking orders into the air, then he put on his shades, and slipped into the Chinatown afternoon.
Old Woman
Because of the nature of the crime, as well as the race of the victim and the perpetrator, Jack took it personally, felt the case needed special attention. So he carried the victim photographs and the perp sketches down the side streets, on his day off, on neighborhood time.
He came off of Mott onto Bayard, walking briskly toward the Tombs detention facility, toward the gaggle of old women gathered on the corner of Columbus Park.
The fortune-telling ladies, elderly women who would have appeared more at home in a Toishan dirt village, congregated by the entrance to the park, squatting on low wooden footstools, spreading out their charts, drawings, herbs, the tools of their divinations. Some had little umbrellas raised against the mist.
Jack sought out Ah Por, a wizened old woman wrapped in a quilted meen naafi silk jacket, her tiny feet in sweat socks and kung fu slippers. She squatted among the old women, on her footstool, quietly chatting with another ancient spirit.
The old women looked atJackwith great curiosity, though they were careful to avoid the rudeness of staring. They watched him sidewise, framing him in their peripheral vision. When he stepped tip to Ah Por, there by the fence, the old women moved aside to allow him in, then re-formed around him, all wondering what this young Chinese man wanted from their eldest sister.
Jack had remembered Pa going to Ah Por many years after Ma died. His visits were to get lucky words and numbers to play the Chinese Lottery, or to hear of good fortune. Now he was coming to Ah Por with victim photographs of young girls, Chinese girls with long black hair.
There was neither recognition nor fear in Ah Por's eyes. She simply accepted him with a sweeping graceful look, and he squatted down on one knee and held the two pictures in front of her.
"Tell me about them," he said.
She took the photographs and studied them intently, then turned them upside down, narrowed her eyes again.
Two preteen girls who looked enough alike that they might be sisters. Preppie school jackets, big smiles grinning out at the world, deep obsidian eyes.
"This one is shy," said Ah Por. "She holds back her laughter. The other is bright, a brave girl."
Ah Por took up her cup, rolled a bundle of bamboo sticks in her alm, letting them fall back into the cup, rolling them again, dropping them again. She did this for thirty seconds, did it with the practiced grace of someone telling rosary beads.
She bobbed her head in a slow rhythmic nod, closed her eyes. Tai Seung, thoughtJack, the art of reading faces.
Ah Por awoke with a shudder. When she rattled the sticks in her cup, they all seemed to rise and dance near the rim. One stick shot out and it was numbered seventeen. She consulted her red booklet with the black ink-brushed Chinese characters, the Book of Fortunes.
She stroked the pages with her long thumbnail, ran it down the columns of proverbs, tapped it on a section of fortunes.
"The first one," she said softly, "will marry a rich man and have two boys." Jack leaned in with his ear.
"The second will do well in school, make a lot of money."
Jack said nothing when she glanced at him.
"But there is something bad following them, isn't there?"
Jack said quietly, "A bad man has hurt them."
Ah Por caught her breath. "Oh dear."
She repeated it several times and then there was a long pause, her eyes looking distant when she said, "I see fire, and someone with small ears."
"The bad man?" Jack asked.
"Fire," she repeated, voice so faint it was almost gone, "and small ears."
Jack got up, gave her five dollars. He thanked her and made his way through the circle of old women.
Nothing, he thought. He had nothing but riddles and proverbs, spirit mumbo jumbo and witchcraft.
And someone was out there raping young Chinese girls.
Nothing, he groused, as he came back around the park, passing through the queues of junket buses, caravans loaded down for Atlantic City, fat with Chinatown cash.
On Canal Street, the last of the gray day was fading out around the gong chong por, factory women, slogging their plastic bags of groceries toward the subway.
Jack turned onto Mott and headed back toward the Fury. He still had Billy's boxes to get, and frustration once again fueled the need to get away from Chinatown.
Change
He took the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River, felt the rumble leave the tires as they bit into the steel grating, the car making a blurring dull buzz-saw sound as it descended toward land.
He drove down the sloping streets south to the Forties, to Sunset Park, the newest Chinatown and his new neighborhood. He had moved out here a year ago, only the second place he could call his own, the first being the Chinatown railroad flat he had shared with Wing Lee that teenage summer before his friend was murdered.
Once a Scandinavian community called Finntown, Sunset Park had become largely Latino, but in the 1990s, the Chinese garment industry had followed low rents out of Manhattan, settled into old warehouses and factories here, blazing the way for the thirty thousand Malaysians and Fukienese who came afterward. Their food shops ran along the main streets, bringing to South Brooklyn the aroma of the Asian hot pot.
Jack took a studio apartment in a renovated red-brick condominium building. It had a view of the harbor and the Bush Terminal docks and, ten minutes across the river, it felt like another world, light-years from the Chinatown he'd grown up in.
He liked the sight of the ships, the freighters that glided across the water, nestled into their docks by the tugs bumping alongside. The way the sunsets played over the harbor was like new medicine, soothing, long overdue.
Now, however, there was nothing but darkness spreading across the overcast horizon.
He poured a Johnny Black into a tumbler and chased it with beer, felt an easy peacefulness settling over him as he scanned the studio.
Even now, a year after he'd moved in, he still kept things to a minimum, mostly portable, transient, disposable items, his life in flux. The spirit of his father, the sojourner, was still in his blood. He leaned back in the recliner, taking a visual inventory of the room.